Increasing online giving

The aims of the project were to increase both the front end user experience and the back end admin functionality, enabling Alzheimer’s Society to create campaign-specific donation journeys, optimised to maximise conversion rates and gift values.

Understanding the user

Researching the online supporters

The charity had limited insight into the motivations of its online supporters, which Addition addressed through a number of research activities including stakeholder interviews, a competitor review, end user interviews, usability study of existing donation journeys and a stakeholder workshop including SWOT analysis.

Internal organisational requirements — from supporter care, finance, digital, data and IT — were also addressed, and all of these learnings were combined with Addition’s extensive donation experience to create a working, device responsive, prototype that was then user tested.

Design and build

User friendly and modern design

Once iterated to the point at which Alzheimer’s Society was happy the design team worked with a variety of teams across the charity — brand, fundraising and digital — in order to create a design that captured all of the previous requirements and updated the design of the current journeys to be much more user friendly and modern looking.

The HTML & CSS implementation that followed was on a custom version of Addition’s donation platform — with payment processing through Braintree — integrated with Alzheimer’s Society’s CRM system ProgressCRM, email system SmartFocus, and Rapidata for direct debits.

Rebranding the journeys

New year, new brand, new look

As the project got underway, we were excited to discover that the charity was undergoing a major rebrand that would result in, amongst other things, a new website being launched in 2017. The plan was for the optimised donation journeys to launch ahead of this new website so we would need to be able to rebrand quickly and with minimum effort.

By working closely with the digital, fundrasing and brand teams at Alzheimer’s Society we were able to future proof the design, taking into account the new brand elements, so that when the rebranded website went live in January 2017, the donation journeys would also relaunch to ensure a smooth transition, both visually and functionally.

This unique design challenge was, through continuous collaboration with the charity, met successfully with a minimum of fuss.

“From the outset, it was apparent that Addition understood the needs of a third sector organisation and this showed at every step of the way, from requirements gathering to completion. They worked hard to understand our organisation, and all of the processes that sit behind the donations functionality, which helped the project to run as smoothly as possible. We’re pleased with the results!”

– Emily Sturdy, Digital Fundraising Manager, Alzheimer's Society

“One of the big issues with the old donation journeys was marketing attribution. We worked closely with the fundraising and data teams to really understand how we could resolve this issue without impacting on the donor’s journey. Our solution enabled the team at Alzheimer’s Society to integrate specific campaign messaging into the journey to create a cohesive user experience.”